wave ten summer 2022 Annick Yerem Bill Sutton

wave five spring 2021 Aaron Caycedo-Kimura Alan Kissane

Hear poet Mims Sully read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Mims Sully back next the poet Nominated for The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, Mims Sully is a poet from Sussex, England. She was a winner of the Visual Verse Autumn Writing Prize 2022 , and has had her work published in Prole , Ink, Sweat & Tears , The Ekphrastic Review , And Other Poems , Obsessed with Pipework and other journals, as well as in anthologies by Sidhe Press and Black Bough Poetry. Mims started writing poetry after studying Creative Writing at the Open University, and many of her poems are inspired by her experience of caring for her mother, who had dementia. the poems Simple Hex For A Slanderer 00:00 / 00:51 Write their name on a piece of paper. Put it through the shredder. Place the ribbons in a bowl. Ignite. Watch them grow tongues, curl back and blacken, flaking to ash. File your nails (the sharper the better) then clip the tips, sprinkle over. Add some callus freshly grated by pumice, a crust of wax picked from your ear and one salty tear. Lubricate the mix with your own spit and lashings of mucus then stir and speak: Unkind words will not go unpunished but form ulcers yellow and bulbous tight with pus on the tongue. My Father’s Belt 00:00 / 01:00 looped around my waist, moves when I breathe like a phantom limb. The leather cracks, moves when I breathe. With bronze lustre the leather cracks as if with laughter. With bronze lustre, his face creased as if with laughter as disease spread. His face creased, a shifting of skin, as disease spread its tightening belt. A shifting of skin drawn across bone like a tightening belt; his body buckled. Drawn across bone this broad strap buckles my body with a strong clasp. This broad strap holds me together with a strong clasp like my father's arm. Holding me together; like a phantom limb my father's arm loops around my waist. Afternoon Entertainment, Chamberlain Court 00:00 / 00:58 I wasn’t sure at first if she was even listening, though we sat in rows in front of the baby grand, as the piano man played all the old classics. It was when she closed her eyes that it happened – her hands started patting her jeans in time to Over the Rainbow. Then her fingers stood to attention, as if remembering: the coolness of ivory, warmth of wood, weight of black and white keys. She leant into the music as her right hand rippled across her lap onto my leggings, while her left hammered chords on the neighbouring gentleman’s knees. And just when I thought I should intervene, she opened her mouth and sang at the top of her voice about a blue-skied cloudless world where someday, I might find her. Publishing credits Simple Hex for a Slanderer: Prole (Issue No. 27) My Father's Belt: Pulp Poets Press (March 1st 2021) Afternoon Entertainment, Chamberlain Court: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Gerry Stewart read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Gerry Stewart back next the poet Gerry Stewart is a poet, creative writing tutor and editor based in Finland. Her collection Totems is to be published by The Hedgehog Poetry Press. the poems Barnhill, Jura 00:00 / 01:10 My backpack saws against my jacket highlighting each stride, 198 4 miles signposted to Orwell’s haunt, the distance doubled to my sore knees. My friend offers scout-leader patience at my toddler concerns of ‘Are we even halfway there yet?’ For her, this is a mere warm-up for tomorrow’s trek of all three Paps. I’m not here just for the mountains, the smack of island blue or long-lost friends, but to reconnect with my first self who stepped blindly on her own path and discovered those things had meaning. Lunch among the thistles, ferns and cow pies below the house, blue seas and sailboats, I relish each aching moment. Back down The Long Road, words on snapped tiles, embedded in mud, read like the poetry of sore feet and bumbling boots. Turned Page 00:00 / 00:44 if I start with soil and the random pull of the sun the hours lost would have a root a truth the glisten of rain solemnity potential in my weight behind the spade’s edge promise in the lilt of a cabbage white from the dark corners of the compost heap if I could start with soil till the hours clean open there would be poetry The Kick Sledge 00:00 / 01:23 I want to take the potkukelkka across a frozen lake on a sinivalkoinen* day. With its mitten-worn grips, wooden seat smoothed by generations, it voices a squeaking, scraping language I can lean into. Trees bow to me under the weight of a fine dry snow. My boots pound, setting up that perfect glide over the singing dark ice. Wind-bitten cheeks, lungs burning, I kick a last fleeting contact with the earth and then fly into silence, uncapturable. When I tire, a fire pit waits with a hand-carved kuksa of tea and a fresh korvapuusti. I pretend to be Finnish. Then I remember: I hate winter, its piercing, truthful glare. Finland and I are barely on speaking terms. I crawl under my duvet until spring. *Blue and white: another name for the flag inspired by Finnish lakes, sky and snow. Publishing credits Barnhill, Jura: StAnza's Poetry Map of Scotland (Poem No. 351) Turned Page: Ten Writers Writing (Lochwinnoch Writers) The Kick Sledge: Spelt Magazine (Issue 1)

Hear poet David Butler read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. David Butler back next the poet David Butler's third poetry collection, Liffey Sequence , was published in 2021 – the same year as his second short story collection, Fugitive . His novel, City of Dis , was shortlisted for Irish Novel of the Year 2015. the poems Distancing 00:00 / 00:53 Now we are wintering – the whole hive stupefied to silence, each in their cell who isn’t soldiering, an inmate of a new Shalott – the cities, simulacra: drone-shot piazzas; enchanted palaces; empty trainset trains; vistas dreamed by de Chirico; traffic lights sequencing the memory of traffic – confined while, ineluctably, somewhere else, the toll, the toll, until we’re numbed by the scale of it; each week, the heat and bustle more distant, more unlikely; nothing to feed but waxing apprehension: what will eclose this long cocooning, and on what tentative wings? And then the sun broke through 00:00 / 00:46 A sea of jade and muscatel; the sky, gun-metal. Landward, the storm-portending birds, white-lit, Riding wild contours of wind, uplift To tilt at the raucous crows. This Is how it is to live, the ticker tells, Looping the floor of the newsfeed. Somewhere, an outrage; an airstrike; Somewhere, a politic withdrawal. This Is how it is to live: the wind blowing The charcoal of crows’ feathers; The rent in the clouds; oblique tines beating Sudden ochre out of a sullen ocean. These Are Not Days 00:00 / 00:46 These are not days, they are shadows flitting over the too-familiar ground, dry and rubble strewn, where our choices are buried. These are not days, these shades, tremulous, mere changes of light. Quiet as thieves, as witnesses, they slip past in silent legion. Count them up, and they come to years, but years empty of substance. They are the dry husks of our lives, the whisper inside the hourglass. Days are not the coinage of will, as once we imagined. One day they rise like locusts, to devour us. Publishing credits Distancing / These Are Not Days: Liffey Sequence (Doire Press) And then the sun broke through: All the Barbaric Glass (Doire Press)

Hear poet Thomas Zimmerman read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Thomas Zimmerman back next the poet At Washtenaw Community College, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Thomas Zimmerman teaches English, directs the Writing Center , and edits The Big Windows Review . He's been active in small press publishing since the 1980s, and his latest poetry book is Dead Man's Quintet . Thomas' poetry can be found in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal , Pulp Poets Press , Green Ink Poetry , A Thin Slice of Anxiety , Grand Little Things and elsewhere. the poems Few Good Things 00:00 / 01:00 A sluggish walk in dewy woods with Ann and Trey, who nearly snagged a fresh-dead bird. The sun burned off some brain fog, thoughts began to breach, and then submerged without a word. Unshowered, stubble-chinned, I had a bad night’s sleep: Trey licking, barking in his dreams. Or maybe it was me, poor poet sad enough to nurse his ironies and memes. And now black coffee’s coursing through my wan and tepid blood, spring-gleam in glacial shade. Yet ennui clings like moss, chill hanging on. Not hard to see how few good things get made. How long this search for beauty, truth, gods’ signs? Ad infinitum? No, just fourteen lines. How Slowly 00:00 / 00:54 Some days, how slowly flows the river: that of consciousness, and I a crumbling cork in it. Oh rudderless. I think of all the swimmers in my streams, some surfers too. All hunted down: white sharks. My screen glows whiter than potential, clean blank canvas stretched, which I, most days, mistake for nothingness. Last night, twice, thunder shook the house. An inch of rain. So muggier than hell today. But after work, I saw a fawn, curled cool in backyard spruce shade, looking at me with intent, or so it seemed. But I admit I often think that you are looking at me that way too. You like to say you’re not. Dispatch 00:00 / 01:10 My dad would have been 94 today, and I’ll be 63 next Saturday. Regardless of which Zimmerman’s alive or dead, years fall like rain to swell the river, same mad god still counting drops. Now, drowned gold sun, dry champagne in your glass, strong ale in mine. I slept in late this morning, haven’t showered. Mind’s a dark pavilion, fairness in the shadow turning blue, and temples gray. I write because I want to feel alive: the poet in the book I’m reading says the same. New moon: late birdsong, whine of tires on the interstate, the bedroom window cracked to let the night air in, death floating lonely and austere. I feel it pass but know that it and I will cycle back. This dispatch from the planet, time, my molecules: so slightly all coheres. Publishing credits Few Good Things: Beakful (November 28th 2023) How Slowly: Disturb the Universe (February 13th 2024) Dispatch: Litmora (No. 0, August 2023)

Hear poet Sarah Connor read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Sarah Connor back next the poet Poet Sarah Connor lives in Devon, England, and is a past nominee for both The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, and she's published two full collections of poetry: The Crow Gods and The Poet Spells Her Name . the poems Stumbling on Beauty 00:00 / 00:50 That summer, I became adept at finding beauty. I reached out for it – the clean-scrubbed nails on the nurse's fingers. They were beautiful. The green flesh of an avocado; a spider's web, caught in a hedge – all beauty. I held it like a trophy. I was so greedy for the loveliness of a child swinging in a playground, of a light caught in water of a bird turning on emptiness – I collected it, collated it, I held it tightly, threw it high, up into the air, like cherry blossom or confetti, like the light that shatters through the branches of a tree. The Red-haired Girl 00:00 / 02:20 Bobby Sands died. That's how old I am. Bobby Sands died, and the red-haired girl died too, two days apart – so now, when I discuss the hunger strikers, I still feel that gush of anger, that someone could just die. We'd been in a school play together, her and I, the Redhead. As if her hair defined her. Perhaps it did. I think now, that hair might have been her mother's first loss, the first thing she mourned. Somebody dropped out, so we both moved up a notch, theatrically. I became the mother, and she became the governess. A comic part. I wanted to play tragedy back then. The father was a guy called Tim. He wore white jeans. Went off and joined the Met. The Metropolitan Police – so that maybe when I was down in London, doing all that student stuff, making my way in party clothes at daybreak through the empty city streets, and knowing this was how my life would always be, if I'd been picked up for some minor crime, or been the victim of an unprovoked attack, so guileless in my tawdry party clothes – it could have been him that I dealt with. And maybe he was at Orgreave. So while I was layering on my eyeliner and putting change into the miner's tin, he was up there, sticking in his boot. So far apart we drift, just spiders, really, riding threads. When my hairdresser shaved my head, she cried, and an old lady sitting next to me reached over – ‘You look just like that Irish girl’, she said, and we all laughed, smiling and sobbing. That was my first loss, but nothing like her mother's – that great cloud of Titian red, those curls, she must have sighed and cursed that hair so many times, and then wept at the losing of it. The Generosity of Birds 00:00 / 00:42 By which I mean The way the robin throws his song out to the world The way the herring gull carves the sky The way the starlings create dreams The way the wren calls from the hedge The way the pigeons swagger across the city square The way the goldfinch embroiders a line between tree and sky The way the blackbird melts the world into music The way the cormorant opens its wings its arms its heart to the wind The way the lark sings only of summer The way the buzzard reminds us to trust the sky Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet J L M Morton read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. J L M Morton back next the poet Winner of the inaugural Laurie Lee Prize for Writing in 2022, J L M Morton is a writer and poet whose work has been published internationally in journals including The Poetry Review , The Rialto and most recently in the multidisciplinary ethnography Living With Water: Everyday encounters and liquid connections . Her latest book is Glos Mythos – a collaboration with satirist Emma Kernahan and illustrator Bill Jones. Her first full collection, Red Handed , will be published by Broken Sleep Books in 2024. the poems An Inheritance of Water 00:00 / 01:15 When I die the chemical signature in my bones will tell of Thames and Severn, Churn and Frome, marrow of upland pastures, mill race and outflow. An ancestral line of dockers loading and unloading cargo. A spring-fed apple tree that transpires deep in a valley sheds fruits that only wasps will feed on. And I want to close my ears to the endless sound of buckets emptying and refilling on the wheel. Is this what we call beauty? Is this a place my hand can hold, still reaching for the world? None of this is clean but it connects. Big enough and continuous to contain all of our lives, our deaths are carried in my blood and breath is carried by water. Rain is another name for love. Life Cycle of the Cochineal Beetle (c.1788) ‘ … it is worthwhile recalling that from the medieval era, one of the colours most prized by the crown, church and nobility in Europe for their finest fabrics was that of carmine or deep crimson.’ ~ Carlos Marichal Salinas ~ 00:00 / 01:51 An egg breaks on the pad of a prickly pear somewhere in Oaxaca where the scale insects’ livid bodies mass and crackle in the sun. Emerging, a crawler nymph clusters with the softness of her siblings to feed in the downy blanket – explorers edging to the brink of the known world. Nymph throws out a long wisp of wax, a thread to catch a ride on the wind, lifting and landing on the terra incognita of a new cactus pad. Her claim is staked with a stab of her beak. Cochineal sups the juices, sees off predators – lacewings, ladybirds, ants – with the bright surprise of her body. Fat, fierce and full of poison. She has detached her wings. Has no need of legs. Holding her colour quietly in trust – she waits for the male to eat his fill, to mate and die. Scraped away at ninety days, her body is laid out and dried, then pulverised. Destined for dominion. On Doubt / A Pair of Blue Eyes After Thomas Hardy and Emma Gifford 00:00 / 01:16 Meeting changed our strata, the way only a storm at the edge of an ocean can do. The way a slump of salt water in a black cliff hole is a wet metronome for desire and regret. Blue milk sea and yellow gorse – it is possible to be ambivalent and beautiful at the same time. Everything becomes an image of our disharmonic foldings. You hanging from the clifftop in search of my jewels. I should have guessed the houses were crappy behind the waterfront where the old lanes run deep, away from the wind, under the pines. Stacked tyres, fly-tipped white goods. We are here for this moment and we fuck it up. Instead of making like gregarious worms in a world of Sabelleria reefs, honeycombed in our detritus. Publishing credits An Inheritance of Water: Raceme (Issue 13) Life Cycle of the Cochineal Beetle (c.1788): Poetry Review (Vol. 112, Issue 4) On Doubt / A Pair of Blue Eyes: Dust Poetry Magazine (Issue 9)

Hear poet Douglas Tawn read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Douglas Tawn back next the poet Douglas Tawn is a poet, actor and screenwriter whose poems have appeared in the in-trays, at least, of numerous literary journals. His first collection, The Collected Poems of T S Eliot, was disqualified from the T S Eliot Poetry Prize following accusations of plagiarism. Douglas holds a 100m swimming badge, and is now working on updating his CV. the poems 13 Birds in the Way of Looking (or The Parliament of Fowls) 00:00 / 05:52 I Following on from the Keats House they taxi over garden feeders the green chute’s permanent flash-spangled guitar licks ascend with a flourish of birds gone wild Para! Para! Para! Para! So we’re left to ask what to make of this ornithological hypotaxis? to wit: where do they belong? to whom do we owe the pleasure? are they not, these birds, out of sight? II ‘We know we are supposed not to leave, but suppose we had some friends to stay? They’d brighten up the place … ’ ( Letter to a Beefeater, the Ravens) III The kite where I come from is not I’d say something to write home about. There again, why write home when you’re there already? They’d say it should be taken as read. Everything has its place, just so the parakeets of London and just so there are no hard feelings, feel free to point them out when you see them. IV magpie silent eyes his pound of carrion starling spangles sky dark with murmuring crows nineteen amass numbering full murder they see the carcass and look no further V ‘Brighten up the place— What do you think we’ve been trying to do? I don’t wear the uniform for fun you know.’ ( Letter to the Ravens , a Beefeater) VI Flush with all heaven’s range blackbird beetles about the town ready to sing and define the age. Even the worms all dig her sound they love her style and critics agree she’s a bird of high renown. They offered her a record deal, all the fat cats in the yard, lining her up for their next meal. But blackbird caught them off their guard “Sure I’ll sign on one condition, so you just listen up hard: “In this deal you give permission for me to sing whatever I please with total freedom of expression.” Those foolish cats at once agreed: they signed up blackbird there and then and prepared for her first release. It was a jazz-fusion album. Didn’t do that well. VII I am not one for sorrow nor was meant to join the dance, signifying union of man, woman and song Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, oh boy! passing under the stage the god, Hercules, whom Antony loved leaves only our senses dimmed and silver with age memories of beaten gold sickening and slow awake the sinning bird squatting greedy overhead like a secret. VIII Behold the fowls of the air: some of them do sow actually; nor did my first draft take into account the barn owl. Behold, they mount the sky; cross-winged embassies to heathen shores; yet why should foreign masters not call these birds native? Behold, the peregrine falcon, a native species; how did we figure that one out? Such divisibility buckles belief. Yet see how this open secret rewards the kingdom; her white cliffs shrink and her statues swell. IX ‘We didn’t mean to offend you. Maybe we could wear the uniform too?’ ( Second Letter to a Beefeater, the Ravens) X Well, that was the day he went completely cuckoo—riding high on Mellow Fruitfulness (I’m guessing the guest ale down the Wheat Sheaf). Real state, yet kinglier in his madness, somehow, he comes in raving about some bird. Now I like the guy, although it’s a pain this nonsense, bursting squawk-eyed mouth oozing in here, proper disturbed, crying “So you like sad stories? I’ll frame you one now: a real traga-doozy!” “Now I’m out on the heath having a blast: the birdies were pinging from tree to tree, the smell of sweet flowers swelled through the grass (my eyes were blurry, but they looked great to me). Then I hear a warbling cry overhead. I look up to find a bird wringing her wings, frantic: “Detested kite! My daughters! No feather stirs, no breath heard—I had hoped to see them grow full singers— here cracked—some parasite has thwarted us!” “At my feet lay two fractured crowns, her chicks. She cursed, forced to feed the alien brood perched over us. Some opportunistic fowl, some sterile conveyer of misuse, some stalking spirit of infestation had laid them there and waste to her daughters. Vile cuckoo! To sin against her singing sisters—” but he couldn’t go on. He crumpled, still muttering tortured slurs, tugging at buttons where his shirt choked him. XI Þhre crowes gaþered aboute a pyloonne “A straunge bowre!” proclaimeþ oone, “Grene leves yt wants,” spake anooþer “Eke he bereþ not swete fruyts nouþer.” “Yt carrieþ mens powre accross the dale,” Resouned þe þrid, “eke illumineþ wele Hire lyȝtsomme wodes, iwrouȝte on hye. Ek þes strenges ylonge do kepe armonye, Makynge a plesaunt noys of musique softe Yherd alounge þes þreds alofte.” Ech herkened, wel lykinge the melodye So þey set þem doon on thys steley treë. XII ‘This probably sounds like an odd request … ’ ( Letter to his Tailor, a Beefeater) XIII The parakeet’s cry retreats over the heath le beau oiseau sans birdseed is all I can think without calling on more authentic superficies (e.g. an MA in Creative Writing, fancy that!) Honk! Honk! That was a goose shrewdly complaining of the lack of water-fowl under discussion today, which is fair, and I think they will agree with me that truly these high-flyers are out of their minds. Les Poissons Puissants 00:00 / 01:04 I, a fish, I want to—hang on sometimes there’s the net (some say a soft cage) one doesn’t know one’s in it until we all are—too late. This is not ideal but we’re used to going unminded—now I’m under the dense cloud of a gunboat here to assert someone’s rights (not mine, I’m sure) under these waters. Dominion over the fish means you gotta let them have it. Where was I? Constant motion makes that a difficult question. Where going? Ditto. That dreadnought means life or wreck to someone. Been a while since one came down here, all noise until it isn’t then we get a chance to nip in and browse: you sink, we swim. Eventually you’re pulled up the sky dense with voices charged with all their differences left ashore—they sound the same to me. From Whitman to Dylan, Their Multitudes ‘(I am large, I contain multitudes)’ ~ Walt Whitman, Song of Myself ~ ‘I play Beethoven’s sonatas and Chopin’s preludes. I contain multitudes’. ~ Bob Dylan, I Contain Multitudes ~ 00:00 / 02:16 ‘Contain,’ we know, has its double sense (both to possess and suppress) parenthesis creates and contains multitudes, in equal parts, suggests copia is more or less the sum of its parts. Repetition multiplies and refines to the singularity from which it starts restarting similitudes; resonating decline. The Song of Myself is no more a song than repeated multitudes mean no more. Was copia their dominant mode all along? An epic rhapsody with an unsettled score? Apparent formlessness finds ease with tradition tracing a song to the Trojan diaspora while The Great British Novel might be on television a saccharine story in aspic vernacular. ‘Past and present wilt’ Whitman tells us wilting his own name into timeless self ‘wilt,’ too, suggests archaic future (ambiguous, but better, I think, than saying ‘melt’) leaving with us wilful tradition refusing the will to be traditional the voice withers in the songs of Dylan as the multitude he’s given have given all. History is the addition of what is lost (Today and tomorrow and yesterday too) to the sum of what is coming to pass (The flowers are dying like all things do) and the past is not what is meant by tradition. Dylan’s flowers wilt in and out of time in time to the off-beating Whitman’s feet: by and by, Lord, they walk the line. Oh my, America! your new-found songs revive the dead democratically each season’s bloom of virtuous carrion stirs equal hosts of union and confederacy: Oh pick out a tune, boys, of Raleigh or Drake They’ll be landing here soon, boys, and make no mistake It’s the song of our doom, boys, sing Lowell and Tate To the Land of the Free, boys— PAY THE TOLL AT THE GATE Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Ivor Daniel read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Ivor Daniel back next the poet Ivor Daniel’s work has appeared in the Cheltenham Poetry Festival's wildfire words , Steel Jackdaw Magazine and Writeresque . He lives in Gloucestershire, where he works as an English tutor. the poems Perfect Bed 00:00 / 00:56 I dream I am at Bembom Brothers Dreamland funfair park with Tracey Emin. Hard by Margate sands. I know I shouldn’t drink that Vodka on the Helter Skelter. Apart from that, a Day as Perfect as the Lou Reed song. We Kiss with Fish and Chips Lips, Join Hips. A Turner Sunset Going Down. I guess it is the Golden Hour. Blair’s Babes and even some of his men MPs are busy Changing a whole heap of things for the Better. Back in your room we remember that we even Changed the Bed this morning. The linen soft and cool next to our Optimistic skin. Questions & Starlings 00:00 / 03:01 Wow! Can the sun set blue azure and flame at the same time? How do starlings twist and turn as one? Who decided this is called a murmuration ? And who was that, going behind that awesome tree? No...It couldn’t be.. sweeping turning swooping......soon arriving from all directions. swelling then melting then swelling. streamlining safe in such numbers. pirouetting protection from predators. twist turn swoop swirl your genie is out of the bottle. shape-shifting unsolid sculpture of starling. you spinning top you sundown twister. a magic carpet has slipped its cave. . ...a cloud of iron filings .. ... dancing from... ..and to .. . . ..an ecstatic magnet. if we could cast the ashes........ of our loved ones as elegantly as your silken swirl then that would be the perfect way to go. intuiting when to turn in complex shifting patterns through a liminal space between remarkable and miracle. flying like no one is watching or maybe like God could be watching. oblivious of compass points and rocket science yet also knowing more than this. murmuration motion poetry in motion your swarm is the truth. black mustard seed beauty. then in the last of daylight at the secret signal a final funneling collective swoop down an unseen chimney to land on your roosting grounds. I labour with my leaden words, and muse on whether starlings know how spellbinding they are. And God. Is that you behind that awesome tree? Is this the last, the only, evidence that you exist? Was this your hobby all along: the choreography of sunset starlings? And is that just the slightest hint of disappointment on your face at how the human cohort of Creation has performed? Tread Lightly 00:00 / 01:31 I navigate the micro fathom ocean charts of flat portal ice puddles on a January farm track With their trapped air bubbles whorling patterns coils gyres spirals curls Trapped otherworldly whirls Secret as fingerprints coiled like intestines mysterious as a foetal scan marbled as the white fat in Spanish ham Iced lava lamps but underfoot Liquid light shows behind psychedelic bands but monochrome The frozen surface flat as frosted glass The patterns captive Zany This is the cat ice So named because it can only bear the weight of a cat Cold-pawed agile Although I am yet to meet the cat who would leave the warmth of the hearth to test ice puddles with its paws or fret on other scientific laws as hydrostatic pressure capillary action et cetera I make a resolution to tread lightly Publishing credits All poems: Exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Charlotte Gann read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Charlotte Gann back next the poet Charlotte Gann is a writer and editor from Sussex who enjoys walking the South Downs in her spare time. Her first pamphlet was The Long Woman , which saw her shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award in 2012. Two full collections followed: Noir and The Girl Who Cried , as well as another pamphlet, Cargo . Charlotte also founded and runs online hub The Understory Conversation : a space for fellow writers to meet, talk and share in small groups and one to one. the poems The house with no door 00:00 / 00:38 The house with no door looks welcoming, with its wisteria and robins. I can see, through the kitchen window, a bowl of cherries. They’re the brightest, darkest, shiniest cherries. But that window’s shut and bolted. I move on round. I know I shouldn’t walk on flowerbeds. I keep thinking the door must be around the next corner. I’ve lost count now how many times I’ve circumnavigated. In the Classroom of Touch 00:00 / 01:36 This is how you hold a person , Mr Farnham says demonstrating. Your touch needs to be light but firm. Felt in the skin like a weight, a squeeze. No sudden movements, please. Still is best. The pupil he’s performing on closes her eyes, head slightly folded like a bird’s. She’s collapsed into his woollen front. See how my arms arc? the teacher asks his class. Hold each other like precious cargo. Never be rough. Don’t shove into the person you love. Don’t steal touch. Be clear about this: we give a hug. Thanks Lydia, back to your seat now. Giles–? The boy stares down at his feet, face pink. His worst subject. Mr Farnham waits quietly, bends his head, smiles. C’mon Giles , he says gently. The boy staggers down the ragged aisle between assorted classmates. Waits while this man opens his arms. Falls forward, hiding his face, his sobs. The teacher enfolds him carefully, whispers, You’re doing well, Giles . Calling Time 00:00 / 02:09 So I’d sit at my desk waiting and hoping and trembling before someone would say it – maybe me – A quick drink after work – and we’d go night after night, pint after pint after pint. We’d smoke sixty cigarettes, drink drink after drink starting at six when seven thirty seemed another, safe country but suddenly was upon us, then long gone and it’s more like half nine and our table a landscape of pint glasses and overflowing ashtrays after trip upon trip to the cigarette machine in the hallway and turn after turn to the bar for another round, another tray of toppling filled glasses and laughter and it still only Tuesday, say, and then the bar staff flashing the lights on and off and it must be after eleven and they’re calling a warning and stacking chairs at the other end of the narrow room and we’re the only table left and still we stay drinking and shouting until they call ‘Time’ and yank the noisy chain grille down over the bar and padlock it and turn the lights off and we grope our way blindly foghorning back up the stairs and even then not out into the night, contrite, rushing for last Tubes but into the hotel bar for residents only where the drinks are even more expensive and it’s just us two now usually and we order ‘A night cap’ then ‘One for the road’ lighting cold fags and slumping on that black-leather slidey sofa in this pot-planted environment with piano muzac playing softly and it’s hard now to keep my spirits up with you falling silent beside me so near and far away. Publishing credits The house with no door: The Lyrical Aye: Richie McCaffery Calling Time: London Grip (Summer 2022) In The Classroom of Touch: The Rialto (No. 81)

Hear poet Corinna Board read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Corinna Board back next the poet Corinna Board teaches English as an additional language in an Oxford secondary school. She grew up on a farm, and her writing is often inspired by the rural environment. Her work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in And Other Poems , Anthropocene , berlin lit , Propel Magazine , Spelt Magazine , Atrium , Ink Sweat & Tears , Magma and elsewhere. Corinna won the Gloucestershire Wildlife category of the 2023 Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust poetry competition, and was commended in the 2024 Verve Poetry Festival Eco-Poetry competition. She published her debut pamphlet, Arboreal , in January 2024. the poems Picking up my prescription ‘Sometimes as an antidote to fear of death, I eat the stars.’ ~ Rebecca Elson ~ 00:00 / 01:00 There are no stars in this city. I nibble on concrete, sip cocktails of NO₂. I’m dying for a decent constellation. Would some of those neons do? Or the flashing red lights on a high-rise? I FaceTime Olivier in the Pyrenees. He points his camera at Ursa Major, Cassiopeia, Orion’s Belt … Star after star devoured through my screen. I whisper Merci , then sleep like a baby. When the woman in Boots tells me I’m glowing, I say it must be the new meds. I keep quiet about the stars. On the tube ride home, they twinkle in my stomach like a Tiffany’s heist. My uncle brings back a fox tail from the fields 00:00 / 01:09 He is carrying his rifle, brandishing the tail like a trophy. A week ago, the fox (was it this one?) got into the coop and slaughtered all the hens. My uncle is grinning. The tail is cleanly cut, bloodied at the end. It hangs from a nail in the big barn, swinging like a corpse on the gallows. For days, I'm scared to touch it. The fur is coarser than I expected. I comb it with my fingers, breathe in its musk, close my eyes and pretend it's whole. Later, I run wild with my cousins. We are foxes — and I, the eldest, am the mother, the vixen. Driven by hunger, I burn through the fields, my cubs left hiding in the ripening wheat. The wind ruffles my coat the wrong way. Too late, I pick up his scent. Field notes 00:00 / 02:02 1. field noun : an area of land, used for growing crops or keeping animals, usually surrounded by a fence. 2. Green as far as the eye can see, then the brook. Water-mint, pebbles bedraggled in weed. 3. A six-year-old girl with a net, a bucket full of bullheads. Friesian cows bellowing, tick of the fence. Where did the years go? 4. Before he died, my uncle planted a rowan tree – there in the tall grass. 5. When we first saw the barn owl, it could have been a ghost. It flew low over the field, wings whispering. 6. If I buried my heart, what would grow? Perhaps a sapling. 7. Today, I have counted three kinds of butterfly: marbled white, common blue, speckled wood. 8. Dear Field, Do you ever dream of picking yourself up and striding off over the horizon? Be honest now. 9. I don’t know what I’d do if you left. I love you, field. Please stay. 10. Are you crying or is that rain? 11. In the field, I’m a child again. All this green, all this sky. I could disappear. 12. Meadow foxtail, yellow oat, timothy. I am the field, and the field is me. I am the field , and the field is me . Publishing credits Picking up my prescription: Anthropocene (July 2024) My uncle brings back a fox tail from the fields: Modron Magazine (Issue Four) Field notes: exclusive first publication by iamb